


Sangre, Sudor, y Lluvia

by Chromat1cs



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: 20th Century, Alternate History, Alternate Universe - Non-Magical, Alternate Universe - Western, American History, Confessions, Daydreaming, First Kiss, Happy Ending, Loneliness, M/M, Masturbation, Minor Character(s), Mountaineering, Mutual Pining, Nature, New Mexico, Painting, Sexual Content, Strangers to Lovers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-30
Updated: 2019-08-01
Packaged: 2020-07-27 10:55:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 16,293
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20044834
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chromat1cs/pseuds/Chromat1cs
Summary: Taos, New Mexico, 1915. A trapper, a painter, and the earth beneath their feet just as red as their hearts.





	1. Norte

**Author's Note:**

> Can you tell I miss New Mexico? I miss New Mexico. Texas cuts it but only for so long.
> 
> I've used a refined ficlet as the seed for this one, it's been stewing in a want for more for a lonnnng time.  
I hope you enjoy, thanks for stopping by~

Trapping is nobody’s game anymore.

He’s technically about 75 years too late, but who’s counting? He was never even alive to see its heyday, only just now scraping 30 himself as he guesses each year at a birthday nobody bothered to mark or, if they did, it’s long been lost to the Hermosillo dirt. The Sirius Black he used to be fled north, away from the mutterings of uprising that left him with a taste in his mouth worse than stone, so he learned the land, learned to trap from the once-companied mountain men he met as he picked and traded his way up to the northern border of New Mexico and Colorado. He stopped at Durango for God knows why, maybe for the cold that was beginning to set in that first winter that threatened snow’s sharp claws the further north he went, but at least it’s beautiful here—beautiful things have always given him pause, perhaps that’s why? Now he sets and checks and reaps his grizzly harvest of furs season in and season out while trying to figure where he belongs now—has been since the day he found himself speaking English more fluently than his old Spanish cant, up and around and through the warp and weft of Nevada and even blinking once or twice at California, but just the thought of gold makes his teeth itch badly with hideous memories of wealth—where he belongs in this stippled unfurling of mountains and skies and riverbeds that wend like all his deeper daydreams. 

Durango is thin air and virulent green, the sort of morning damp that sticks in the weave of wool blankets for naught but half an hour before the sunlight burns it off like the hiss of a cigarette. Taos, the other end of his route, the closest he’ll let himself get to Mexico again without feeling the phantom pain of  _ patria, _ is the middle-burn of that same cigarette, still high up in the tuck of its mountain armor but with something in the absence of raking-high forests that makes Sirius feel as though he can breathe when he’s back in the flats of the plaza.

But for now the summer is beginning its downward tip and he’s north, tucked into the woods and breaking down his camp and whistling an aimless folksong from somewhere he’s never known. His traps have been small things lately—stoats, foxes, never the stomach to fell bison as the most lucrative left among the trappers, almost a puma that nearly killed him when he stumbled on a rock path—and he’s looking forward to the thrill of trading soon. The patois of back-and-forth, miming to cover where the dearth of understanding gets too patchy, pressing a carefully-folded fur into someone’s hand as he gets in return food, new clothes, even better coins or some paper money if the fur is large enough despite the headache inherent in making that paper worth anything to him; bliss. Quite honestly the only thing that makes him feel present these days beyond a quick fuck. 

Sirius fucks less often than he pleases but probably more often than his sense or his wallet wants. He hadn’t let himself think on the reality of his compulsions until he was far enough north, free from the  _ mea culpa _ cathedra and the weight of anything close to society telling him the things he never wanted to hear in the first place. His first breach into his present reality had been a trail guide he met in Hidalgo, probably close enough still to Mexico to smell the last of the air there but with both feet solid enough in this new country not to care for the suddenness—he had called himself Prewett, second generation Irish and paving a path much further south than the family in Montana about which he talked without prompting. Sirius had been thirsty for freedom and drunk on those blue eyes of his, and so when they both stumbled into a grove along Sirius’ chipped-English request for  _ North— _ gold coin stamped with the last vestiges of his past pressed into Prewett’s palm—Prewett had only to give him a meaningful look before Sirius accepted the offer of temporary timelessness suspended in the flesh and heat of someone else’s passions. 

It had been different than he dared to let himself imagine up until then, but in that it had also been far, far better. In the past ten-odd years since then Sirius has slaked himself along his routes with other trail guides, vaqueros, boys at the rare brothels that employ them, mountain men who know how to read someone without saying a word, the odd pioneer or eastern visitor who hasn’t had the freedom to do so yet outside the clog of the cities Sirius has never and will never visit as long as he draws breath. They’ve given of one another, the pass and trade of the body just as fine as conversation for these moments— _ hoc est corpus meum quod pro vobis tradetur, _ sometimes still the church coming back to haunt him even amid sweating, spoorish splendor—before, inevitably, Sirius either returns to his trail or these men move on into further depths of their American dream. Manifest Destiny, more like  _ manifold  _ destinies, these wayward sons of the world piling up on the old legends of the frontier and everything stacking up beneath them to surge them forward like a great, tumbling mass of change.

Sirius prefers routine. He straps his broken-down camp to his saddlebags, his mare whickering beneath the weight and chewing her bit for the want to start moving in the morning cool, secures the jangle of his unloaded traps along their stays, and swings up onto his saddle to head back south to the town that feels the closest to home he’ll allow anymore.

—

“Una tequila.”

The late afternoon sun is beginning to bend in a bruising clutch around the Sangres outside, Taos having arrived to Sirius swathed in her July gold and tawny, low adobe walls ringed by all the faded greenery after a long journey down. His legs ache in the sweet way they always do after a day riding just a bit harder than he meant to, ready to dive into drink and forget he has muscles for a couple hours.

The barkeep slides him a stout glass, slightly dusty even after being wiped clean—everything here is dusty, most likely even Sirius’ throat, especially the dark brim of his hat—that Sirius downs in a single swallow. The barkeep raises an eyebrow at him, short dark hair slicked to the side, small mustache tidy above his lip, hasn’t Sirius caught this one’s eye once or twice before? Sirius leans on the bartop to tip up the brim of his hat and smile like a rattler. “Hola.”

“Good evening, sir, have you wine?”

Sirius pauses, slides his eyes to the right, tugged over by some sudden instinct to hear the question on a voice too soft to be born from the trail. He’s right—the man come up to stand beside him, both hands touching lightly at the bar, one hand knocking softly with soundless knuckles as though excitement fills him for some reason, is a clean-shaven portrait of delicacy. His suit is an immaculate tan paired off with a blue tie, of course just a bit dusty but perfectly-tailored nonetheless, and his hair is pomaded into a part so clean that Sirius would bet both his pistol and his bear gun on the fact this man has never worn any sort of hat beyond one for plain fashion.

The barkeep looks relieved to be pulled away from Sirius’ solitary attention. “We do, only red. Is that alright?”

“More than fine, thank you.”

The dandy-man, or well-dressed enough to be one, stays standing as he waits on his drink. Sirius circles his empty tequila between his fingers for about three seconds before he shifts to lean one arm on the bar and smile his best trade smile, the one he reserves for passing a hare pelt off as weasel. “Passing through, or here to stay?”

Mild surprise looks well on this stranger, pulling a pair of startling green eyes over to Sirius while that soft-looking mouth of his twitches into a pursed half-shape of arrested thought. Oh, he’s lovely. “Sorry?”

“Are you on your way to somewhere else, or staying at the Inn for a while?” 

Sirius lets the man look at him, nodding once at the barkeep when he returns with a full-bellied glass of dark wine—dusty—to summon another sharp shot of tequila. He knows he looks the perfect opposite to his unexpected drinking companion, all trapper-rough from his ride down from Durango; chaps scuffed, boots muddied, spurs caked with dirt, stubble long for his simple uncare for shaving for the last two days. Besides, his hand mirror cracked somewhere between Pagosa Springs and Tierra Amarilla and the only way he could have traded for a replacement along the way had been coming across pockets of Tiwa people with no need for an Anglo’s attempt at bartering things they already had themselves.

“Oh, I’m staying for a little while. Are you—do you know Mister Sharp?” The stranger’s eyes light up just a bit, and Sirius’ penchant for pretty things flares in his belly at the sight. He receives his second tequila and sips it this time instead of shooting it.

“I haven’t had the honor, no.”

The stranger looks back at his wine glass, worrying it between his fingers just a little, almost bashful with the movement in a way that makes Sirius feel another sharp twist of fondness, strange and unbidden but entirely welcome in his seasonal respite here for several weeks. “Sorry,” he sighs, “I’ve been mistaking everyone in this town for another artist.”

“And I look like an artist to you?” Sirius’ brows go up, his arms spread casually, looking down with doubtful dramatics at his own getup. The man laughs a bit, exactly had Sirius had hoped, and Sirius shakes his head. “Unless you’d consider trapping an art, no sir. But I take it you are?”

“Yes, I’m in from Philadelphia.” The man shifts to sit on the stool behind him, and Sirius mirrors the motion as he whistles low.

“That’s a long way away,” drawing out the word on the  _ n, _ his mutt’s accent of Spanish and sparse Tiwa and all those shredded pieces of Mexico mingling in with his Americano drawl. “Doesn’t it usually work better to make art in a big city? What are you doing here with all the mountains and the dust?”

“That’s just it.”

The movement to sip on his next taste of drink stops on his lips, Sirius’ eyes flicking up to look at the stranger as his voice sharpens just enough to make Sirius’ heart twist. The well-dressed man bites down his bottom lip and stares out the open window behind Sirius, at the peaks of the Sangre de Cristos dyed a rich red at this hour, before he continues; “I’m a naturalist, I paint landscapes. I’m here to join Mr. Sharp’s art colony. I was told the land out here was beautiful, but nothing really prepared me for it.”

Sirius quells the humming in his lungs, something quick and hot and wholly startling as he watches the strangers lips while he speaks, with another sip of tequila. “When did you arrive?”

“Three days ago.”

“What for, just to leave the east?”

The stranger’s eyes flash again, as though a candle behind his pupils is telegraphing every feeling in that pretty, proper body of his, with unexpected ferocity. “I hated it there.” He cools marginally when Sirius’ expression likely telegraphs vague surprise. “I—as you can expect, there isn’t much about the city that’s very natural. I had to take trips up north, and even then it was all still so...lived-in, I don’t know. We’ve been on that side of the country for so long, I suppose, but  _ this?” _ The man gestures to the same window, over Sirius’ shoulder, looking as though he’s staring at something holy out there in the sunset. “This is another world, just begging to be painted.”

Sirius sketches a toast at the man, his head nodding in a short, low bow with the motion; he glances at the man’s shoes. While, of course, dusty, they’re well-heeled and carefully polished. The very subtle envy of comfort gnaws at Sirius’ back, but he ignores it in favor of silently agreeing with his own reverence for the land here. “You seem as though you’ve found a good spot then. Welcome to the west, mister…?”

The stranger smiles a quiet sort of smile, half-confused and half-amused. Sirius’ throat dries up a bit more than usual, as though he’s swallowed gravel. “Lupin. Remus Lupin.” He holds up his wine glass to mimic Sirius’ toast and takes a sip, through which Sirius’ trapper-quick awareness notices him take a full look up and down Sirius’ stature. Sirius grins and holds out a hand.

“Sirius Black.”

His own calloused palm is met with the fine-boned softness of a hand that has never known hard labor in its life, but a peculiar sort of strength grips him when they share a solid handshake. Sirius smiles that same rattler smile, and he’s well impressed to find that Remus returns a what looks for a moment like a jackrabbit grin only to see a wolf’s instead when it shifts just so. Philadelphia man indeed, this desert-new artist appearing like a mirage in the Inn, everything Sirius has dared to let himself imagine as alluring perfection but always believing it to be out of reach. And now here he stands, shaking Sirius’ hand, solid as pyrope.

Begging, as he said, to be painted.


	2. Durango Revisited

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Introspection, quietude, and feeling a bit further away than Sirius wants to be despite the routine of it all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A couple hundred words about Sirius jacking off in the woods, you say? Boy howdy, you've come to the right place.
> 
> (Things will begin picking up a bit more after this chapter)

Mr. Joseph Henry Sharp’s art colony ends up being a small cabal of seven men that take to calling themselves the Taos Seven: Joseph Sharp, tidy white beard and spectacles betraying him for the Ohio man he is despite his permanence here in Taos; E. Irving Couse, with his laughing bright eyes and round face ever in Michiganer contentment; Oscar Berninghaus, clean-shaven and prone to laughing a bit louder than his fellows during their meetings; W. Herbert Dunton, called Buck by the other painters despite his thin face and bushy brows more similar in Sirius’ eyes to a hare than a deer; Ernest Blumenschein, with pale eyes that seem to see forever beneath that heavy balding brow of his; Bert Phillips, all fair hair and dark brows with that east coast chew of his voice so angular amid the hum of the Inn’s other patrons in the evening; and Remus Lupin, quiet youth so staggering and obvious as the outlier among them but able to hold his own, gaze bright and voracious, as they discuss anything and everything with regards to their work putting northern New Mexico to canvas.

Sirius sees them meet several times over his couple of weeks of stasis here, waiting for his trails to calm up north to give him the chance to flush out more than just a few catches on his next trip out—his tab with the propriotess at the Inn, one Lily Evans with the bravo’s heart to keep her own last name even after getting married to her San Francisco-handsome husband, is entirely based on saving some of the prettiest furs for her when Sirius can manage it. He sleeps comfortably here, if not a bit restlessly for the way he finds his mind and his restless wanderer’s dreams leaping to and away from catching sight of Remus throughout the town. There, the high noon sun against his wide-brimmed hat, keeping the heat from his face while also steadily bronzing his skin where it goes uncovered, illuminating his silhouette to wave at Sirius across the plaza with an easel and his paint box in hand. Here, the glancing blow of a preoccupied little smile over a shallow glass of port, laughing genially at Mr. Blumenschein’s story of one thing or another before sliding his eyes across the dining room and landing squarely on Sirius as if to say,  _ What are you doing all the way over there, Mr. Black? _

It’s a maddening—if not terribly enjoyable—something, utterly out of the ordinary for the past several summers in which Sirius has wheeled away his off-season in Taos. As usual he drinks, he repairs and builds traps in preparation for the early autumn, he takes the luxury of sleeping past midmorning and waking alongside the sunrise instead of well before it; as not very usual at all he also finds himself daydreaming about abstract whorls of paint curling across every league of the landscape stretching out around him, bringing himself off in the stiff quiet of his room almost every morning with the shape of an east coast smile brightening his imagination, and nearly slipping from his saddle more than once from excitement when he passes Mr. Lupin on the northbound trail making his way back into town with a canvas propped in one hand and his paint box in the other, smiling up at Sirius and asking genially about his day with the whir of the Rio Grande and the chitter of summer wildlife rising around them in all its low-brush expanse.

After six weeks of this new normal weaving its way into the odd jobs of carpentry and scouting and hunting Sirius takes on to pad his wallet, both for the Taos folk and the Pueblos further into the mountains, Sirius finds himself reluctant to even think of preparing for the incoming winter on the trail. He hasn’t felt the compulsion to miss a place since the first several months after his flight from Hermosillo, and even then it was easy enough to shuck off that husk like the snakeskin on his boots. The thought of leaving Taos for the trail now digs somewhere deep behind Sirius’ ribs, like an inkpen scratching one name into his bones over and over again.

In September, despite the niggling internal resistance, Sirius saddles up to double-check his gear for the third time. He’s moving at a trot halfway to the northern edge of town when he sees the seedling-dot of Remus’ approach before him, moving easily down the trail ringed by the poppy-gold sunrise with the square blot of his canvas in hand. Sirius feels his resolve buckle once more before he turns to take the northwestern trail instead, not trusting himself to face one more of Remus Lupin’s smiles that, accidentally or not, always seem to say  _ Stay with me just a while longer _ , and spurs his horse to a gallop he’ll hold for longer than usual in the hectic need to escape his pounding heart.

—

Durango is cold and Durango is wet, but Durango gives him a better haul this season than he’s gotten in a long time.

Sirius’ teepee leaks a little on one side but there’s enough abatement in the rain, then snow, then rain again, to hold off the worst of a soak for most of the six months he spends there, solitary and chilly and growing a beard he notices is beginning to streak ever so slightly with grey already when he manages to catch his reflection in the stream one morning—glass-clear and calm as a mirror before jumping in to slough off several days of dirt, chilled to his marrow, breathing in the mist and the birdsong around the light chatter of his teeth sometime around mid-February. He amasses a stack of surprisingly varied furs, a few rare all-whites with one put aside special for Mrs. Evans. He thinks, one evening as he chews long and slow on a leg of rabbit with his eyes trained unseeing on his latest furs hung for drying, not for the first time about the possibility of keeping several of the best cuts aside for a longer rental cache this coming off-season. The thoughts of remaining in Taos have become more frequent the longer he’s let them linger, and Sirius can’t decide whether or not he’s upset about that.

The Colorado woods calm him beneath all the damp and the muscle-ache borne from waiting and watching and skinning—nursing the long strips of time doing nothing in between checking his traps and hunting his meals is something Sirius has always appreciated, this placidity of sinking into the wilderness every season as though being embraced by the roots making their eon-slow way through the dirt far beneath his camp. The difference here between the flat calm of Taos, that valleyed other, the place he’s secretly begun calling  _ Home _ in the very deep and inaddressable folds of his thoughts, is more staggering than ever, he thinks more mornings than not over tin-pressed coffee and a tightly-rolled cigarillo.

When he isn’t trapping he’s hunting, when he isn’t hunting he’s repairing something, when he isn’t repairing something he’s catching at sleep, and when he can’t grab onto unconsciousness’ old fraying chasuble Sirius is lying back with his warm fist wrapped tightly around himself, blood-hot and rigid—furtive yet attentive in the fine-misted mornings or afternoons or most nights running now, pulling himself off to idle fantasies of Remus and his paintings.

It takes Sirius by mild surprise through this long chill of winter to discover those thoughts keep him warm to some deep-knit extent, there amid that constantly-eddying pool of heat in his belly. The compulsion rears up on him at a nearly incessant chase like hoofbeats through his veins, steel-shod and clamoring to be heard over both his deepest concentration and his idle meandering musings in moments of pause. Sirius finds himself blessing his seclusion here more than usual whenever it gets too intense to bear and he needs to see himself off in the middle of the woods lest he burst like a berry still on the stem—kneeling in the underbrush with his fly thrown open and panting clouds of sticky steam through parted lips; shivering sharply but frantic to spend after washing in the stream; stretching out the knots in his back against a tree while his hand wanders south to dip hallowed and hot into his jeans; he could just as soon stop himself as he could wish away the thoughts that spark the arousal.

He thinks of Remus saddled behind him on horseback, his hips matching the sway of the ride with dangerous accuracy; Remus emerging from the Rio Grande, the sun flecking the water on his shoulders like gold as he steps out slowly to reveal his whip-wire nakedness; Remus painting an impossibly huge canvas with nothing but his fingers, covering every blank spot with color until the only canvas left is Sirius’ own skin, onto with Remus eagerly smears technicolor handprints lower and lower and lower; Remus’ mouth opening below him into a smile, then a gasp, then a wet-hot groan of satisfaction through teeth that flash brighter than daylight on rhyolite cliffs; Remus, Remus, Remus.

When February finally closes and March breaks like an egg, flowers pushing through snow while the sun begins the steady crawl to lengthen her stay in the lapis-eye of the sky, Sirius feels his blood hum with just a bit more readiness to see Taos this season than ever before—Taos, and desert, and dust, and Remus, Remus, Remus.


	3. Taos, Returned

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A homecoming? If one can call it home; he might be able to, after just a bit more time. Maybe.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Interacting and not just living in the theatre of Sirius' overpoetic brain? In MY western AU? It's more likely than you think.

He rids himself of his beard on his final morning out, squinting down at his reflection one last time with his razor strop hung from a spring-naked tree trunk beside him. Sirius finds himself humming an old tune into the air as always, filling the space of his solitude alongside the birds beginning to wake up throughout the forest. The scrape of stubble stays behind as he goes with his horn-handled straight-razor, never able to cut as close as he needs without the luxury of a mirror that doesn’t ripple with snowmelt, but he figures it’s plenty civilized as he rinses off the thin froth of soap with a splash and sets to packing once more.

Sirius returns to the Inn as if in a fog, half-expecting last summer to have collapsed as a dream and leave him alone as all the years before. He ties his horse outside, tosses a penny to the groomboy who meets him there to board Minnie as always, and holds his breath as he shoulders his way into the cool dim of the sitting room. Sirius’ eyes take a moment to adjust to the difference against the late afternoon trail glare outside, but his heart flexes when he hears a familiar laugh dance over the air at the end of someone else’s story and curl around his ear like a kiss. He blinks and squints in its direction, suddenly hungry for sight.

“Mister Black!”

_ I’ve missed you, _ Sirius quashes the ridiculous urge to shout, turning blindly to face the middle-sweet sound of Remus’ voice with the sun spots still chasing their way to the edges of his vision like ink in water. Sirius smiles his best smile, the one molded around the machismo of every vaquero he ever looked up to, and tips up the brim of his dusty, sun-bleached hat; he should get a new hat sometime soon. “Mister Lupin, what a pleasure to see you again.”

Vision clearing then finally, blessedly, the light outside combing in through the just-washed windows to fall in long rays like some sort of church interior made for stragglers and all the forgotten folk from the rest of the nation’s periphery, Sirius sees Remus standing before him with his hands in his pockets and a broad grin on his face—white linen shirt with the collar left open, tan trousers, a light jacket, just as put-together as he had been when they first met but  _ oh, _ something about him now telegraphs the found comfort of sinking into a place one can finally stretch their wings. Sirius remembers that feeling growing in him slowly the further north he moved all those years ago; Hidalgo, Luna, Sierra, Soccomo, Torrance, Santa Fe, each town before Taos like a layer of hell shucking off behind him to shatter under his feet, free one more stay of his heart, let one more piece of his deepest truth see the sun until arrival saw him bare and new and glittering in the daylight.

Oh, it is the deepest pleasure to see Remus again. He looks stronger, broader, his skin a darker russet for all the time he’s likely spend outdoors even in the soft grip of winter— _ especially _ in the soft grip of winter, if the vista of the river gorge blanketed white hanging behind the bar with a small  _ R Lupin  _ scrawled into its low corner is anything to go by. Sirius can’t help but drink him in for just a moment before returning the handshake extended to him. Remus’ eyes flash. Sirius tightens his jaw and levels their gaze, feeling the air warp just a bit between them as their palms touch, warm and solid.

There is, he knows at his center of centers, something here. It will only take time to determine exactly what and how deeply they can both let it go.

Not four days pass of more of the same that transpired between them last summer—the hellos, the niceties, the discussions of the weather and the painting conditions and all the little things so clearly avoiding the closer press of the way Remus spoke to him when they first met,  _ That’s just it _ , the ferocity in those moss-brown eyes never leaving Sirius’ memory even in deepest sleep—before Remus approaches him one afternoon with two pints of sweating beer in late March and a determined look in his eye.

“You know all the trails in the mountains, don’t you?”

Sirius raises an eyebrow, one hand poised above the second-to-last row of Solitaire he’s got spread on the table before him with playing cards worn by time and dusty fingers. “I’d be a sorry sort if I didn’t.”

Setting one beer down across from Sirius, Remus sits with the other still in hand and sips off its head as he squints. “Fair point. I’m compelled to paint some wildlife lately, and I was wondering if you could help me.”

“Need to see some furs?” Sirius shuffles the cards away into a messy pile to his left and leans both elbows on the table instead, cradling the beer between his hands as he fixes his eyes on Remus. It isn’t as hard to meet that stare lately, to match all the depthless horizon lines and sunrises and sunsets Remus has likely secreted away into those eyes, but it still plagues Sirius’ guts with a sort of wrenching sweetness when he forgets to steel himself against it nearly every time. “Most from this last season are traded away already, but I still have some hares and deer left.”

“Ah, no.” A tiny smile flickers onto Remus’ mouth. Sirius quashes the urge to lick it off by taking a deep sip of his own beer. “I would like to sketch them living, do some studies. I figured you might know where they tend to stay.”

“Depends on who you mean by ‘they,’ coyotes don’t tend to bed down with quails.”

Remus gives him a flat look that makes Sirius smirk and flick his eyebrows up in genial challenge. “Wolves,” Remus says plainly before leaning back slightly in his chair and smiling to himself—Sirius ignores the flipping feeling in his chest. “Mr. Dunton did a small series of dogs recently and I’ve been inspired.”

“I hate to break it to you, but wolves and dogs have a few choice differences between them,” Sirius says, his penchant for obstinate semantics bubbling up in a scraping compulsion to quiet all the squeezing pleasantry that sharing a drink with Remus is causing in him. Their knees are nearly touching, cluttered together under the table.

“Do they?” Remus hums, clearly buying into Sirius’ wit, giving him a mild look and taking another sip of beer. He smiles gently again, a laughing smile; “I hadn’t noticed.”

In the end, Sirius agrees to take Remus along to try and find some wolves along with the warning that might come up short. They aren’t half as ubiquitous as they used to be, chased out by humans and their penchant for over-culling everything—more than a slight itch of regret flexes in him at that, the veiled fact that Sirius has been at least a small part of the problem himself with more than one Mexican wolf pelt taken in his time. But Remus looks determined, promises to meet him at the Inn early the next morning, and leaves him with a grin that could light tallow from mud. Sirius is weak to the potential of it.

He chases sleep on a fool’s errand late that night, steeped in shallow dreams lit by carnelian mountainsides and the smell of charcoal pressed between eager fingers.

Sirius is up just after sunrise the next day, watching it trip over the hillsides and bleed down into town as he leans on the post next to Minnie’s hitch. He sips coffee through the calming ritual of saddling the mare, her chestnut coat darkling in the low light beneath the brightly-patterned saddle blanket he bartered for in Tesuque several seasons back, and looks up when he hears approaching footsteps on the soft crunch of the early-quiet road.

“Morning,” Remus greets him, smiling over the soft ridge of Minnie’s mane and the well-worn horn of her saddle from the opposite side of the horse. He wears a grey beaver felt hat with a good stiff brim and has a leather bag slung over one shoulder with a design beaded across it that Sirius recognizes from the Picuris Pueblo nearby, and that evidence of Remus connecting with the native people makes something in him warm like a glowing hearth coal. Sirius bites his back teeth together and takes Minnie’s reins in one hand.

“Ready to scout?” Sirius leans over to set the Inn’s near-empty tin cup down on the porch table beside him before righting himself with a low, even breath out to pat his horse absently on her neck. Remus nods, holding his hat down with one hand.

“Whenever you are.”

Sirius swings up easily into his saddle before freeing his right foot from its stirrup and extending a hand down to Remus. “You ever mount a horse behind someone?”

There’s a very faint tracing of pink that touches up under Remus’ cheeks, but Sirius tells himself it’s simply a trick of the still-waking daylight. “I can’t say I have.”

“You’ll take my hand, stick your right foot here in the stirrup, push up, swing your other leg over, and sit on her rump just behind the seat of the saddle,” Sirius says, gesturing vaguely down at the parts of horse and saddle as he explains. “It’s not the most comfortable thing, but we aren’t riding too far so you only have to hold tight.”

A vague humming starts up under Sirius’ skin once he takes Remus’ hand, and it hardly abates as Remus carefully slots his foot into the stirrup and swings up behind Sirius. He only wobbles a little bit, and once he shifts his seat a couple times behind Sirius he seems settled. He grips the back edge of the saddle seat with both hands before nodding at Sirius. “I’m all set.”

Sirius almost presses the notion that Remus might want to hold onto his waist instead for a better grip, but then he feels it—the crackling of avoidance, that unseen texture like the flat scrape of cactus spines in the very small space left behind himself and Remus to score the unsaid fact that Remus could have simply ridden a second horse down the trail beside him instead. Sirius supposes he’s not about to press his luck of proximity by asking for too much yet—and can’t find the muster to care that neither of them brought up that option to begin with—and turns back to face front as he tugs softly on Minnie’s reins. He clicks his tongue against the side of his teeth twice and kicks his boot soles back softly, and with that they’re a-trot off to the northern trail into the mountains.

They talk sporadically about the nature sprawling out around them for the half-hour it takes to reach the trail on which Sirius knows one might find wolves, at least going by two seasons ago if nothing has changed too drastically. Remus mentions midwinter here, noticing the flat caps of white still frozen atop the peaks they can see here from the ground, and Sirius takes calm pleasure in imagining the verdant desert around them blanketed with snow. He’s seen winter in Taos only twice, once when he was too taken with illness to leave for the proper trapping season and once when the cold held on through March and let him return to an enchanting sight of near-untouched white covering the red earth. All the while, Sirius is acutely aware of the warmth and the breath and the low hum of the voice behind him—nearer than anyone has been in a very long time, near enough to touch but still so out of reach Sirius might just burn up from the inside out.

Ducking into the piñon trees soon enough, keeping their heads low for the springtime branches that bat at the brims of their hats, Sirius digs into his trapping habits and sharpens his eyes and ears to keep a watch out for all things that might point to wolves in the area. Remus goes quiet as though they’ve just entered consecrated ground, and Sirius is grateful for it. The woods, to him, aren’t a place made for any chatter besides the prattle of nature itself, carrying on whether or not mankind is there to bother it.

After nearly another half hour of slow progress through the woods, Sirius hears it—a thin howl, the mournful pule of a pup learning how to call for its mother. Remus inhales sharply behind him and the rumble of a murmur starts up in his throat, but Sirius reaches back sharply to lay a firm hand on high thigh with a soft hushing hiss. Remus quiets immediately, shifting slightly where he sits, and Sirius is too focused on pinpointing the fortuitous little sound to worry about removing his hand from Remus’ leg very quickly at all. He draws it back slowly while he tugs Minnie’s reigns in the right direction, his fingertips scraping softly, accidentally, at the khaki of Remus’ trousers as he goes.

Minnie picks her way through the forest carefully with Sirius’ gentle encouragement, the finest trail horse he’s ever had, rounding eventually onto a clearing at which Sirius hears the pell-mell crash of underbrush and warbly little yaps of pup-talk some several paces away. He pulls the mare to a stop and turns, indicating with a shallow nod to Remus they’re dismounting here, and slips easily from the saddle to stand beside the horse. He gives Remus a hand again to help him find his footing on the forest floor from the awkward shape of horseback, and he holds in a chuckle when Remus winces with the wide-legged pull of riding posture.

Wordlessly, brushing off the legs of his trousers, Remus gestures to the edge of the clearing with what looks like eager permission lighting his expression. Sirius nods with a finger to his lips as he ties Minnie loosely to a tree before he moves forward first with the soft, full-footed roll of bent knees and silent steps into the trees. Remus wrestles a sketchbook and a pencil from his bag before crouching to follow him, nearly a-glimmer with excitement.

Sirius stops behind the huge cover of a fallen ponderosa pine trunk, ducking lower to sit back and peer over its edge. True to his ears, a miraculous little offering of nature, there’s a clutter of four wolf pups several paces away, playing in a tumble of nips and flopping hilarity and looking just several weeks old. Sirius can’t help the silly grin he feels take over his face, and he glances at Remus come up to crouch beside him to see rapt awe on that saint’s face of his, bright and clear as the cloudless sky, as his pencil begins to fly along the blank page beneath his hands.

Torn between watching the wolves and watching Remus sketch, Sirius’ insides well up with something he hasn’t quite felt in earnest since crossing into New Mexico and seeing the stretch of untrod desert unfolding before him to the edge of the horizon and beyond the bend of his eyes; adoration, but a specific angle of the ache the seats itself solidly in that which is unknown, unseen, unfamiliar. It’s an apprehension of sorts, a catching of the breath, and as Sirius lets his gaze flick back and forth between the wolf pups and their flawlessly efficient little renderings leaping to life beneath Remus’ pencil, he feels it acutely between his lungs. It tightens in his chest, prickles his vision at its edges as though suffocating on it, and Sirius loves it, loves it,  _ loves it _ —wants to chase it through the warrens of his blood like a runaway rabbit, bound down through his depths to the blood-rich core of his longing, hold it in his hands and swallow it whole in messy slurps until he’s drunk on it, rich with the feeling, seeing gold through eyes brimmed up with the courage of newness. Desire crashes through him like a storm, the blood, the sweat, the rain of it; Sirius holds his breath and tries to imagine all the ways those nimble fingers pulling pictures out of thin air would feel dancing across his skin.

A sound at the opposite end of the clearing pulls Sirius from his heady reverie, and he looks up with his heart in his throat to see—luck of all lucks, some forest spirit must be helping him along—the mother of the pups slink into the clearing, tail low and relaxed, nosing at her babies with soft little whuffs and whines. Sirius looks immediately to Remus and nods ever so slightly to pull his attention up from the page, snap those Rio-green eyes to his own like a prayer before flicking into the clearing and suffusing quick with wonder. Remus turns his page silently and starts in on a larger sketch so immediately real that Sirius’ guts seize to see it take shape, the curve of her paws and the ruff of her fur at her neck.

He is, if Sirius would care to listen deeply enough to the battering of his heart behind his ribs, falling wholly in love.

They sit crouched for perhaps the better part of an hour, dead silent in the temple-quiet of the forest, through which the wolves continue tumbling and laying about in thin shafts of sun, dozing and whiling away an afternoon as only animals can. When they move off it’s with a sharp sniff of their mother’s snout—perhaps catching the scent of Minnie, or the whiff of civilization hanging off of both Sirius and Remus—before they’re all trotting off into the underbrush, tails a-swing, part of their daylight well spent. It takes several more long moments of comfortable quiet as Remus finishes up his drawings, lost still in the loft of creation, before he speaks again.

“Thank you,” he murmurs emphatically, his third pencil of the morning finally stilled on the last page of his for the first time since opening his sketchbook. Sirius keeps in his amazement at the life rendered there in the mother wolf’s eyes, staring up from the paper with animal conviction Remus has somehow captured in graphite, and simply smiles.

“Any time.”

When they’re in the saddle once more, Remus swinging his feet up with a titch more surety this time, Sirius forces himself not to stutter at the feeling of Remus slipping one arm around his waist instead of simply gripping the edge of the saddle. He spurs Minnie into another careful trot, dry pine crunching in a whisper beneath her hooves, and lets a secret grin show to the empty trail before him as he resists the urge to comb his fingers into the warm strength of Remus’ palm pressed comfortably against the lower front of his vest, holding fast to him amid the soft sway of horseback.


	4. Terribly Fond of Adobe

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Magnificence, missteps, and muddy immediacy.

Halfway back to town, his hand still gently gripped onto the front hem of Sirius’ vest, Remus finally breaks the comfortable silence drummed up between them.

“Why Taos?”

Sirius makes a noncommittal sound, tosses out a shrug with one shoulder as he steers Minnie’s walking path away from a patch of sweet grass. “Wyoming isn’t what it used to be for trappers, and I never wanted to go that far north anyways.”

Remus seems assuaged, a soft hum of comprehension thrumming in his throat so close Sirius can nearly feel it at his neck. Sirius steers his spangling imagination away from the texture of that sound, the nearness of Remus’ thighs, the press of his hand and the puff of his breath, and focuses instead on the faint smudge of the town rising up in the distance as they draw closer.

After another few moments, Remus draws breath again; “Why trapping in the first place anyways?”

“It’s what I’m good at,” spoken with a mountain man’s simple confidence, the payout he’s earned from that short history of a young man learning what he had to in order to survive his first winter and then managed to make a living from it. Sirius glances over his shoulder at Remus and catches sight of the edge of his profile, staring east into the Sangres. “Why painting for you?”

A small smile twitches at the corner of Remus’ lips, and Sirius turns back to face front before his heart can leap from his ribs and into Remus’ lap. Remus’ fingers tighten ever so slightly on the worn fabric of Sirius’ vest, as though trying to absorb it into his fingerprints.

“It’s what I’m good at.”

They ride in silence again for the rest of the time it takes Taos to arrive completely from across the horizon line, dredging itself up from the warp of heat-melt at the surface of the trail like some ridge-backed beast spackled together out of adobe and wood. Sirius revels secretly in how natural it feels to be companionably quiet with someone, such that he almost misses the way Remus surreptitiously draws his hand back to himself as they leave the promise of solitude from further out on the trail.

Dismounted back at the Inn, Remus insists on buying a round of drinks—”Bourbon, tequila, whatever you’re sharp for,” regardless of the fact it’s only noontime, his hat off in one hand and arms out wide, some type of creative conquest grown high in those cheeks of his as he walks backwards to the inn with a devil-may-care smile flung at Sirius. It’s as though he’s able, for the first time Sirius can see, to truly celebrate his relative youth when propped up alongside the other far more senior members of the Taos Seven;  _ I’ve just seen a litter of wolves from eight feet back, _ Remus’ posture and swaggering gait sings as he turns on his boot heel with a jaunty kick, up the steps of the Inn with Sirius trailing behind him with ardor thick at the back of his tongue,  _ Put that in your fucking pipes and smoke it. _

Sirius orders single-malt to sip on while Remus dives straight into a stout glass of tequila that he downs in one shot, followed by a tall glass of beer he then sets in to sipping as well. “Cheers,” Sirius says with an air of doubtfulness he means as a rib, but Remus misconstrues it with a sunny grin that knocks the wind right out of Sirius and leaves him speechless for just a moment.

“Cheers.” Remus taps the bottom of his glass against the rim of Sirius’, drinks down a gulp of it, and sighs wide into the marginal quiet of the Inn at this hour. “Thank you, again.” He thrums with energy so pure it’s almost sinful, so brilliant Sirius hopes idly it doesn’t blind him somehow.

Sirius nods a shallow bow of deference and removes his hat, smoothing one hand through his hair to shake it out and roll his shoulders back as he rests it on his knee. “My pleasure. Can I expect to see our furry friends on canvas sometime soon?”

“Maybe, if I find the right spot for them somewhere.” Remus smiles at him as though he knows something Sirius doesn’t, some painter’s joke or another, but Sirius finds he appreciates it regardless of context.

Remus asks about Colorado and Sirius asks about the Pueblos, trading the evidence of their past couple of months spent separate as though it can soothe that empty feeling of being absent from one another—at least, that’s what the press of Sirius’ heart wills from the plushy ditch of his insides. “And how glad are you to be here now, instead of back east?” Sirius finally asks, reaching the bottom of his glass with a comfortable blooming fuzz at the edges of his vision. Remus smiles and Sirius wants to drink it up from his lips.

“Immeasurably. I think I’ve avoided a number of horrors, actually, did you hear there’s a war on?” Remus looks at him mildly, running a finger around the rim of his glass. Sirius snorts with a sharp shrug.

“Isn’t there always a war on where white men are concerned?”

Color rises in Remus’ cheeks but he nods, his eyes flicking over the ochre of Sirius’ own skin and perhaps cataloguing the differences in their origins for more than the first time. “Yes, I think you’re right,” he says halfway to himself, swallowing before he squares his shoulders a bit. He quirks a very subtle and sunny grin before pushing the topic in a more casual direction; “My residency here has given me much to be thankful for, in that sense. I’m thinking of purchasing land, you know.”

Sirius raises his eyebrows and sketches a toast with his empty glass. “Congratulations.”

Remus’ expression shifts to beaming again as pride peels its way up through him, and Sirius nearly feels the need to shield his eyes from it. “Thank you! Mr. Sharp has been telling me it’s entirely worth it, and I’ve been talking with some other locals about what I might to do make it work,” Remus says, as Sirius notices he’s begun to talk with his hands with only about a third of his beer left. “I have inheritance left over in an account from Philadelphia that’s only been waiting to see what I should use it for, and what better thing to do than build a house?”

Sirius gives him a wry smile, fighting his pulse to keep it in check as he watches Remus steady himself on his barstool with his hands holding the edge of it between his knees. “What indeed. I commend your ability to stay in one place, that’s never something I was able to master.”

In a flickering crumple that punches into Sirius’ gut like buckshot, something behind Remus’ eyes goes dark for a moment. Sirius sees his jaw work briefly, subtle beside the lowest whorl of his sun-bleached gold curls, but Remus covers whatever skip in his rhythm just gapped before Sirius can decipher it beyond feeling such sharpness behind his liver. “Well, I’ve always wanted a house,” Remus says tidily, with a little nod as though affirming it to himself as he glances at the woodgrain of the bartop, “and I’m terribly fond of adobe.”

He smiles again, but it’s missing something. The deepest well of Sirius’ affections riots quietly inside him.

For the next twenty minutes Sirius avoids the compulsion to apologize to Remus for whatever it is he said that jilted their conversation. He wants to ask after the light he somehow chased out of those eyes, the excitement he could see in the jitter of Remus’ graphite-stained fingers and the subtle pitch of his voice, but every time he summons up the breath to say something as Remus takes smaller and smaller sips of his drink as though wanting it to last as long as possible, he can’t say it.

They part just after the sun tips into mid-afternoon, Remus saying something vague about the Sangres and Sirius agreeing with a quip about sharpening his tools, and Sirius’ bones feel bird-hollow as he tromps up to his room and shuts the door softly behind him. He leans back against the jamb and stares out his window, square eye to the south, the unseen presence of Santa Fe and even Albuquerque looming there in the stretch of desert, and tries to drum up any budding roots or internal buckles with which to tie himself here.

All he finds, frowning out into the lowering sun overtop the flat roofs and raking valley edges outside, is the echoing shudder of craving something he hasn’t even tasted yet.

—

Sirius wakes the next day to the unique and heavy sense of raincloud darkness hanging low over the town.

The first storm he weathered here was a biblical ordeal, barreling in like a platoon he could see from miles off in locomotive steel heaviness—sweating down over the basin in a vow of what was to come, slung off in a slanted surge, Sirius had half expected it to seep in gradually but it came in sheets so heavy he could hardly see the mountains beyond their foothills for nearly two hours straight. He understood then what the fuss about a rainy season could truly be, up here in the mountains but still flat and prone as though the earth might fill up like a lake and spill over its sides someday. Ever since then, he finds himself imagining desert thunderstorms as a cleansing sort of ordeal, something that might wash away even his deepest hurts and regrets if he just opens himself up to the sky as the sky opens her maw on him all the same.

He collects his coffee and a small breakfast of chile stew from the bar after dressing and pulling on his boots, and as Sirius eats he watches patrons huddling a bit tighter in the dining room and glancing up at the sky through the windows more often than usual for the trepidation of getting caught outside in weather like this. He looks around several times for Remus while he works his way though his second cup of coffee, his gaze bouncing around the sitting room and lobby visible from his seat, and only quits when he sees Mr. Blumenschein seated easily in front of a north-facing window.

Sirius is up before he really means to be, footsteps quick and spurs rattling faintly on the floorboards, and to Mr. Blumenschein’s credit he doesn’t even glance up from his sketchbook when Sirius stops beside his table. A raincloud poetically identical in painfully-detailed ink to the one swallowing the peak of the mountain just beyond the building outside has leapt up on the page beneath his inkpen, and Sirius watches him add a few more lines that score the realism of it even more so before Mr. Blumenschein pauses and looks up Sirius with an open expression. “Good morning,” he hums, setting the sketchbook open flat on the table.

“Morning.” Sirius fidgets just a bit, resists the compulsion to cross his arms, and simply hooks his hands into his front pockets. “Have you seen Mr. Lupin around yet today?”

_ I need to apologize to him for something and I don’t even know what, _ he stays himself from continuing. Mr. Blumenschein furrows his brow in thought and sucks in on a pipe Sirius hadn’t noticed clenched between his teeth, taking his time staring out the window and blowing a couple smoke rings before answering. “I believe he took the trail north by foot just a couple hours ago,” the artist says at the same time Sirius feel impatience begin gnawing at the insides of his cheeks. Sirius balks.

“North?”

“Up along the Rio. He said he was going to paint the rainclouds rolling in.”

Blumenschein’s eyes crease pleasantly at the corners like a doting father, but dread drops heavy and thick into Sirius’ stomach. “‘Scuse me, thank you,” he says quickly, turning on his heel to shoulder out into the front courtyard without waiting for another answer.  _ North, up along the Rio _ .

The river gorge can flood in the blink of an eye.

Sirius bangs into the stables and beelines to Minnie, greeting her with a soft hush when she whickers and tosses her head to see him. He fits her bit between her teeth before securing her bridle and nearly reaches for her saddle, but a peal of thunder rumbles with such a crack along the sky that Sirius abandons the thought, throws open the mare’s stable gate, and hefts himself into a bareback mount. He digs his heels back with a low whistle to bid her forward, steering her tightly with the grip of his thighs and a steady hand, and waits until her hooves clear the cobbles of the plaza’s edge before he kicks into her flanks to shout her into a gallop,  _ “Yah!” _ Minnie bolts forward and Sirius sits low as he braces to the speed with one hand holding his hat on his head, rocketing north into the smear of the storm brewing like black magic high above the mountains.

The pattern of freneticism drives into Sirius’ thoughts to eat them whole,  _ chakka-tum, chakka-tum, chakka-tum  _ across the trail in a ripping sprint over the dirt. Lightning splits white through the sky and Sirius counts it along with his slamming heart,  _ one, two _ —another catastrophic crack of thunder shudders, the storm rolling closer, and Sirius grips his reins tighter to urge Minnie forward as if she weren’t already at a dead run.

Sirius scours the river gorge with his eyes, primed to catch at the shape of Remus’ hat or the oblong jut of a canvas propped up amid the swaying marigold bushes. Nothing. He grits his teeth and suck in a breath.  _ “Remus!” _

His voice flutters in broken echoes along the rock faces cleaving up on either side of the trail, the sound dashed to pieces against each slab and crack. Lightning flashes again, thunder claps just behind it. Sirius can smell the sharp tang of rain thick in the air and snarls to himself. He tries again;  _ “Remus!” _

Nothing.

The trail bends to match the river, still fairly swollen with last week’s gentle showers that seem such folly to the cacophony spilling its way southward now, and Sirius continues sweeping the gorge like a hawk after a rabbit. Minnie’s pace is relentless but it still feels as though it isn’t enough, not nearly enough—

“Fuck!” Sirius throws an arm up instinctively as he meets the incoming torrent of rain in a great hissing rush like some snake spirit unfolding in a heavy pile to rear down from the clouds, the rain its venom to temporarily blind Sirius as the landscape blurs in hues of silver-blue and smears the distance into nothing but a wash of mottled grey. Minnie snorts irritably but keeps her pace, and Sirius spits the wet from his lips as he presses his hat down more firmly on his head.  _ “Remus!” _

Yelling is futile at this point, he knows it as the barreling toll of thunder crashes again overhead—now it’s on him in earnest, or rather he’s in it in earnest, throwing himself into the fray like some mad dog chasing the catch he may or may not find.

It’s by the strangest luck and a flash of off-white that makes him look to his right and yank Minnie to follow it with an ungainly rear, her whinny sharp at him in surprise. That’s it,  _ there, _ undeniably the jumble of a ruined canvas being wrestled down from an easel at the top of a small hill just above the trail. Sirius’ heart floods with warm-water relief, the surge of hope and arrival and all things bodily resisting panic and disaster. He doubles down on guiding Minnie’s gait up through the rocks, and he only slows when it comes time to pull up to a stop alongside a very flustered and furious Remus.

“What the hell were you thinking?!” Sirius shouts above the storm, swinging down from Minnie’s back to immediately set to helping Remus get his paint box cluttered together and fold down his easel. He _ meant _ to say something along the lines of  _ Thank God I found you, I was prepared to climb up Wheeler Peak if I had to. _

Remus doesn’t respond for several long moments, focusing on clamoring all the necessary buckles and stays shut so as not to wreck his paints any further, before he stops and gestures sharply at the ruined, half-painted canvas now on the ground. His face is hard, his line drawn into a thin line, and his hat dripping sodden at its brim. “I wanted to paint the rainclouds,” he spits, and Sirius isn’t imagining the note of helplessness there in his raised voice.

“I don’t know what all you’ve seen of rain out here yet, but it sure as hell isn’t like the cities.” Sirius frowns and points aimlessly up at the storm. “We got lightning and wind and nothing to break it, and the river floods like a fuckin’ drunk!”

“Well I’m sorry for not knowing everything!” Anger flashes bright across Remus’ face like a fork of lightning, and Sirius finds that it staggers him just a bit. “I’m trying my best out here!”

“Just get on the horse,” Sirius insists as he swipes more rain from his face and picks up Remus’ paint box for him, suddenly regretful—of course Remus doesn’t know how the weather would behave out here, he said it himself; this is a different world.

He turns to take up Minnie’s reins again, but Remus’ voice stops him; “Why can’t you stay in one place, Sirius?”

Screwing his face up in confusion, Sirius spins back around. “What?”

“Why can’t you  _ stay,” _ Remus repeats, his eyes hard, standing incongruent in his stillness against the riot of weather billowing around them, “why can’t I stop thinking about the next time you’re going to leave again?”

Sirius’ mouth goes dry. He drops Minnie’s reins and sets the wooden paint box down on a tuft of grass, taking a step closer to Remus with his brow still furrowed. “I’m a trapper, Remus, it—”

“And I miss you when you’re gone!” Remus’ throat catches around his sudden shout just before another burst of thunder shudders around them, and Sirius glances up at the sky to make sure they aren’t going to be smited by some divine fury deciding to wipe them clean before Remus can weave any other confusing lovelinesses between them. Sirius’ heart leaps into his mouth and he waits for Remus to continue, shoulders soaked through his vest and his shirt and his very skin to drum raindrops onto his bones. Remus swallows and tries again, staring down into the black-marbled halls of Sirius’ gaze; “I missed you when you were away for the winter, and I haven’t missed a man a day in my goddamn life. How dare you?”

His spirit seizing, Sirius narrows his eyes and takes another step closer to Remus, less than a hand between them such that Remus has to tip his face up slightly to keep glaring at him. “How dare  _ me? _ How dare  _ you!”  _ Sirius points a sharp finger northward and grinds his teeth slightly before finally spilling truth, “I spent my entire fuckin’ season in Durango dreaming about you!”

Remus’ face twists with an intoxicating coil of surprise and wry rebuttal, and Sirius’ resolve shatters beneath him and the secrets he’s just aired like a sheet forgotten on the line, flapping wildly in the storm. “Oh,” Remus laughs bitterly, “don’t even get me  _ started _ on dreaming, I—”

In an instant, Sirius finds that nothing in this moment matters besides finally letting himself buckle to the eden of allowing his heart to speak freely. He takes Remus by the sides of his face, ducks down to keep the brims of their rain-drenched hats from crashing together too sharply, and kisses Remus for all he’s ever been worth in these stolen scraps of life of his.

Remus returns the kiss almost immediately after just a tick of surprise, latching his wet fists to Sirius’ collar and tugging him closer as if there was any other distance left to cover between them. He tastes of tea and bitters and the lemon candies kept in a dish by the Inn entrance, and as Sirius licks into his mouth and tries to remember to keep breathing he find that no kiss has ever felt so simple, so necessary, so absolutely  _ true, _ as this does now, even in the middle of a rainstorm that could peel a tin roof from a lean-to. Even as another tocsin of thunder rails above them, Sirius drinks deep on the sensation of kissing Remus Lupin as though he might never breathe again after separating. He devours it, top to tail, divining the smell and the slide and taste of it like fine wine he’s only sipped a few times in his life—never could again after this, what could ever be better than this—

Jolting the haven of the moment, lightning cracks just a few miles off to startle both men into a gasp that tugs them apart. Remus’ eyes flash with the refraction of the white light, dark and full from so near, and Sirius is suddenly starving for every blessed ounce of him. “Come back with me,” he pleads, “to my room.”

Remus nods wildly, rainwater flicking from his hat, and collects his salvageable materials with stumbling grace. Sirius helps him up onto Minnie’s slicked back, hoping quietly they can both hold on even amid the rain, before mounting again and urging her slowly back down to the trail where they can snap once more into a gallop.

His heart soaring along with the coal-black thunderheads, Sirius clasps tight to the arm that wraps fiercely around his waist from behind and doesn’t seem as though it would let go even for the end of the world itself.


	5. Teeth and Time

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There is rain, and then there is always the warmth to burn it off in the end.

The storm thickens as they ride, the trail beginning to splash beneath the harried four-beat of Minnie’s pace with the crash of the river frothing as it swells over its banks, and Sirius doubts more and more they’ll make it back to town in any sort of solid state.

“I have a cache,” he yells over his shoulder, over the howl of diluvium, still clinging to Remus’ arm twined up about his chest while the painter’s cheek presses against Sirius’ back and he shivers along with the rollick of their gallop through the wet and wind, “just a ways up still, about halfway back to town. Old storage cave, we need to stop there and weather this.”

“So long as its warm,” Remus shudders into Sirius’ shoulders, burrows nearer to leech what little heat he can there, and Sirius spurs Minnie forward evermore—snorting steam into the rain drench, gnashing at her bit, clamoring over the ground with her hooves spraying mud behind their flight.

Sirius pulls up on speed when they come into the foothills on the eastern edge of the trail, into the bushes and the wind-whipping trees to pick out the path he carved years ago into the brush. He frowns at nothing in front of him, rain dripping off of him in overburdened beads in counterpoint to the smattering against the pines and the rocks, and he only pulls Minnie to a stop when he finds the familiar shelf of granite to shelter the mare and dismount in front of the gnarled mouth of the storage cave. He swings down and helps Remus slip off into a stand, crowding him as though Sirius might shield him from the rain battering them at every side, before quickly tying Minnie’s reins to a trunk and hurrying their two sodden bodies alongside Remus’ paint box and easel up into the dry protection open before them.

The smatter of rain slaps against the shape of the cave walls in shallow, wet echoes from outside as Sirius immediately sets to gathering the materials for a fire he keeps tucked into one of the back edges of the cache. He glances up as he tents the logs and kindling together at the cleared center of the worn furs that have long been carpeted on the ground here, to monitor Remus carefully setting his easel and paintbox against another dry side of the cave—still shivering—before the painter sits heavily with his knees drawn up and wraps his arms about his shins.

Sirius’ hands tremble when he strikes his flint, and not simply because of the cold.

The fire leaps to life after the second spark, albeit with more smoke than usual for the stone-damp logs, and Sirius blows steadily on the embers to tend a larger flame up before setting the last log carefully into the split-wood pyramid coned around the dry grasses burning up beneath the layer of twigs. The piñon bark makes its comfort-sweet smell as it begins catching in the silence between both men, its light growing to illuminate the cave like a closely-held secret. Remus looks up at the walls, his teeth chattering, and gapes.

“What are these?”

Sirius glances up with a small smile at the clutters of etchings scrawled all over the interior of the cave, and when he looks back down he can’t find the strength to pull his eyes away from Remus’ enamored expression again for even a moment as he removes his hat and squeezes several drops of water out from the tendrils of his hair like wet ink. “Petroglyphs.”

“God. Who made them?” Remus squints into the back of the cave where some kind of scene with a long, toothed creature and a cabal of square-bodied people are smattered along the stone in what Sirius has always thought, wiling away a devil-hot afternoon or particularly cold night here when he craves nature on his off-season, looks like some kind of angular dance.

“The people who were here long before me, that’s for sure.” Sirius feels another sharp shiver wrack him before he remembers his wet clothes, at which he immediately begins tugging off his boots and peeling away his socks.

“They’re beautiful,” Remus murmurs. Sirius takes quiet pleasure in the way Remus’ voice softens even beneath his shivering, palms open to the heat of the fire and yet still staring up at the walls, such that the sputtering sound of surprise he makes takes Sirius off-guard halfway through the motion of shedding his shirt.

Sirius furrows his brow and lays the soaked fabric out flat on the ground as close to the fire as he dares, setting to the button fly on his jeans. “What?”

“You—it…” Remus gestures vaguely at Sirius’ half-nakedness, his eyes wide and searching for a synapse while he throws an open hand out at Sirius. “Here? Now?”

Sirius thinks for a moment before he blinks and another sharp shiver wracks him. _ “What?”  _ He repeats, but it’s the pained  _ Don’t Make Me Say It _ look that Remus sends him with nothing but a tilt of his head that brings up the clarity in his brain. He scoffs. “Oh, Jesus, Remus, I’m taking off wet clothes so I don’t  _ freeze.” _ He shakes his head, pleasant heat rising in his own face beyond the warmth of the fire, and sets back to shucking his jeans. “You should too, otherwise it’s a damn fine way to get pneumonia.”

Remus watches him dumbly for another several moments and only turns away when Sirius kicks off his jeans and sets to shimmying out of his underdrawers in the same motion, scrambling into a stand and turning his back on Sirius. Some inscrutable mutter sneaks out under his breath as he shrugs off his sopping jacket before flicking unsteadily at the buttons on his shirt—Sirius holds in a snort, lays the last of his clothes out before the fire now at a healthy burn, and fetches the largest furs from a small stack of them on another end of the cave.

He lets Remus have the privacy of looking away for the most part, forcing his eyes to glue to the thick curtains of rain still coming down outside instead. Sirius thanks the fortune of this place at the back of mind as he wraps himself in a broad, winter-plush coyote pelt, one pillowed each around his lower and upper body, shrugging his wet hair over one shoulder as he waits for Remus to be through undressing—he had found it by accident one of the first times he came south, losing the trail for the exhaustion of forgetting which way was exactly south on a particularly hazy day. After sleeping off the slog of torpor for a night, his face pressed close to the cool rock and gorging himself on the last of his fresh water, Sirius had been prepared to waste away in the little hovel before realizing Taos was only another hour’s calm ride south.

“Do you have any more of those furs?”

Sirius looks up to see Remus sitting again, pearl-naked with his ankles crossed demurely and his toes curled in a bid for privacy, and Sirius bites down on a sharp bolt of affection as he nods. He passes the biggest and warmest skin around the edge of the fire and holds it out until Remus has a firm grasp on it, his hand nearly disappearing completely in the deep coat of the Mexican wolf fur. He wraps it around his shoulders with a grateful huddle, and Sirius decides he won’t tell Remus of the origin unless he asks directly after it when he has a memory flash of the wolves playing in the clearing just yesterday past.

“You look like some kind of king.” Sirius offers a small smile as he tries at lightness, and while Remus is still shivering in the whole-wrapped refuge of the fur, just his knees and hands and head visible, he gives a pale smile back. It’s nearly brighter than the center of the fire crackling before either of them.

“King of stupid decisions,” Remus says softly, but before Sirius can assuage the tug in his guts and clarify whether or not Remus is talking about kissing him, Remus looks up to meet his stare with punishing accuracy; “Tell me, Sirius, do you make a routine of kissing ridiculous painters?”

Sirius narrows his eyes as though taking on some kind of aspect of the long-dead coyotes wrapped around his body as they begin to warm him from the inside out. “No,” he murmurs, “but I can make a habit of kissing a brilliant one if you’d like that.”

Snorting with light derision, Remus is looking back into the fire and shakes his head very shallowly despite the deep flush that rakes up from his collar to his lower cheeks. “I’m not brilliant.”

“Are you kidding me?” Sirius leans forward, drawing his knees up under him and sitting back on his heels as he stares intently at Remus. “You think any of the other artists in town would be out there, braving a storm, to paint those clouds?”

Remus gives Sirius a doubtful look, the fire dancing off the curve of his eyes and shining marginally against the clammy damp still clinging to the rest of his face. Sirius wonders if he looks even half as enchanting with the angles of dark and light warring so sweetly along his body. “Buck has painted clouds even better than the real thing, way before I got here. And besides, I...” He stops himself as shrugs, a defeated shape of a thing; “the canvas got ruined. I’ll just have to try again with my imagination.”

Sirius doesn’t know what to say beyond that, nonetheless if what he could think of saying might even be construed as something helpful. He stays quiet, letting warmth return to his bones, and looks back up at Remus when the painter shifts in a way that makes it obvious he’s mulling something over. Sirius watches him patiently until Remus tightens his jaw and meets his eye.

“More than anything,” Remus starts, seems to catch himself, pauses for a moment to push a wet curl out of his eye and bite his lips together briefly. “I needed to be out in the open. It was less about the clouds and—it was me needing to find something more immediate, something bigger to paint, than just thinking of you over and over again.”

His breath catches and Sirius clenches a fist around the fur near his own forearm. He swallows, watching Remus watch him with an even stare as though he’s taken his own turn in possession and has the wolf wrapped around him twisting just as well behind his irises. “Did it work?”

Another sardonic grin tips at the edges of Remus’ lips, those lips Sirius kissed not even half an hour ago, and Sirius’ heart cries out silently through his body to claim them again. Remus shifts to wrap the fur tighter about his body and lets his head fall slightly to one side, his neck curving gracefully around the knuckle of his throat and the stretch of his fine bones and tendons therein.

“Not in the slightest.”

They go silent again while Sirius finally finds true warmth well up once more in his belly, suffusing his body as he dries in the face of the fire and the respite of the cave. He adds another several logs to the fire, not missing the way Remus tries not to watch his bared torso bunching and shifting as he moves and the fur falls away from him just a bit, and curls more tightly into assuming comfort there on the ground as he figures out where to go from here with the perfect portrait of all things painfully desirable bundled up across from him.

It’s Remus shifting a bit closer around the fire, warming one side instead of just his front and scooting nearer to Sirius as he stares out at the rainstorm, that breaks the spell of quiet on a near-whisper; “Don’t leave again. Please. I know it’s silly of me to ask, but if I don’t I’ll always be wondering what might have happened if I had.”

He isn’t looking at Sirius, deflecting his eyes, the very subtle tightening at their corners perhaps going unnoticed had Sirius not locked his attention to Remus like a set of tracks on the trail the moment he drew breath to speak. Emotion clenches fast around Sirius’ heart and, for once, doesn’t relent to a deep breath in or out. Sirius swallows and shifts a titch nearer to Remus’ place on the ground. “I have to go each season,” he says gently, staying himself from reaching out to touch Remus just in case their kiss had been a fluke, a product of passion and panic and the hectic drumming up of thunderstorm thoughts. “It’s what I do, it’s what I’m good at. Remember?”

Remus sniffs out a bitter, soundless chuckle and nods, chewing gently on his lower lip. “Of course I do. Just figured I might try.”

Lightning flashes again outside with another roll of thunder quick on its heels, and with it Sirius is suddenly struck by the compulsion to utterly inhabit Remus Lupin—hold him, shelter him, kiss him, fuck him, calm him, the culmination of every moment spent letting him run through Sirius’ memories for the past several months rising up in a veritable storm inside him to match the shuddering arrival coming down outside. He reaches out and rests a hand on Remus’ bared ankle, still cold at its core but warmed on the surface by the fire, and Remus turns to look at him with something so achingly close to hope in his eyes that Sirius can hardly keep his heart in his chest. “But I can promise I’ll always come back again.”

Those variscite eyes fall open, defenses down and the clear force of adoration surging up through them as though drawn through the half-dark on an unbreakable thread. Remus puts his hand atop Sirius’, his finger and thumb stained faintly with indigo pigment, and winds their fingers together. “Then promise me.”

Sirius’ heartbeat trips up to a canter, falls directly into a gallop instead as he slides his other hand up the expanse of the fur blanketing Remus and skims his fingertips against the bare rondel of Remus’ shoulder. “I promise.”

“Again.” Remus twists to face him fully, invites him to slip that hand up the column of his neck to skim the drying wet of his spun-gold hair. Sirius swallows, nodding distantly to the unseen saints of tomorrow perhaps carved into Time’s rock itself as he drinks in Remus’ face from so near without the clash of nature coming down around them.

“I promise.”

Sliding his own hand into the warmth of Sirius’ folded crouch, pressing his palm flat against one side of his ribs as though wanting proof of his breath, Remus leans in close and stares him down. “Again.”

Sirius bows close, curling overtop of Remus and holding him, finally, with one hand pressed against his lower back and the other cradling his head—the coyote smiling down at the wolf, all teeth, all love, their knees and shins slotting in preemptive closeness beneath the folds of the furs around them. Sirius lets his mouth hover a hair’s width away from Remus’ lips, feeling their breath mingle hot in the space left there, and sweeps his thumb tenderly along the atlas of Remus’ skull.  _ “I promise.” _

Remus yields to him like water, like rain and the streams of silt woken up in its wake, and Sirius drinks him down deep as summertime as they renew their kiss. Rock and fire are their only witnesses, the furs their only armor to the sharp points of ardor and all her lovely graces.

Steadily, Sirius kisses Remus down into the soft bristle of the wolf skin until he’s prone on his back, arching up against Sirius’ body and the roaming press of his calloused touch. He’s peppered with soft golden hair at the hollow of his throat, the tops of his forearms, the long lines of his legs and the midline of his belly, down to the unimaginably hallowed nestle of it between his legs where Sirius reaches, grips, growls with approval through a particularly hungry twist of his lips to feel Remus grown hot and hard. Remus presses encouragingly into his palm, arms looped desperately around the backs of Sirius’ shoulders with his fingers tangled into the yet half-dry curtain of Sirius’ hair—“Again,” he gasps, the plea like a prayer, and Sirius knows then to weave his promise into the very marrow of the moment blooming up around them.

As though reading the pace of Remus’ pulse with his lips, Sirius begins the slow, tracing path down every byway of his body; neck, shoulder, chest, belly, down to the crests of Remus’ hips where he takes a moment to lave his tongue over the soft jut of bone and breathe, shallow and heavy, as he meets Remus’ eyes from down along the stretch of his body. “Can I?”

“I—no one has used their mouth before,” Remus rambles in half-voice, addled by his own arousal, his pupils so huge in the firelight Sirius almost can’t pick out the thin ring of his irises. “I want you to.”

“Oh, I’m going to use my mouth,” Sirius explains against his skin, pressing the words into the pale hook of an old-looking scar just beside Remus’ navel as he grows fervid with the need to make Remus come apart, “and I’m going to use my hands, and you’re going to come with my name on your fuckin’ teeth.”

Remus can only cry a broken sound of approval up at the cragged ceiling as Sirius dips down to take his first taste, stripe his tongue up and opening his lips to Remus, before they spin together into the earthen grip of sex. Remus’ fingers dance along Sirius’ scalp and down across the tops of his shoulders, scrabbling everywhere at once as though searching for grip on the sheer slabs of granite outside, spurring him along with every pass of Sirius’ mouth and every swallow that draws the mounting sounds of bliss up from Remus’ depths. 

It’s the slow, exquisite build toward oblivion, and Sirius is in to the palm, crooking gently into his warmth with two fingers, when Remus reaches his breaking point. “It— _ Sirius,” _ he chokes out, almost a sob, and so Sirius hums the affirmative around him in a low spur, begging Remus silently to look down at him, look down at the perfect mess of pleasure being lavished on him; Remus sucks in a sharp breath, lets it out on a shorn sound of ecstatic impatience with his head thrown back, pants twice, and finally looks down at Sirius’ unflagging attention to his body. Nostrils flaring, mouth falling open in a wet gasp, Remus meets Sirius’ eyes and comes with the sling of release thrown open like a stone flung through the air.

Remus melts in a boneless shudder, gasping and moaning and vulnerable, pulse after pulse of his completion unstoppable against Sirius’ tongue, to lie back against the furs beneath him as though being held down by the jaws of those animals themselves and surrendering to that terrible bliss of mortal rending. Sirius sees him through it, attentive and hungry, and only draws back when Remus flinches with a jagged leap of hypersensitivity.

“God, you’re a beauty,” Sirius growls as he wipes at the corner of his mouth, sliding up onto his knees to draw a reverent palm down the length of Remus’ torso. He watches, rapt, as Remus trembles against it sweetly, both pressing into it and twitching away from the touch of anything besides the ground beneath him, and takes his time tracing slow, gentle patterns against his skin until Remus can open his eyes again—heavy-lidded, heavy-limbed, full-hearted gaze punching right down to Sirius’ core. Thunder rumbles again outside, amplifying the secrecy of their closeness therein.

With refraction-putty fingers, Remus reaches down and grips Sirius softly just behind his thigh as if in reply to all the indolent touch laid down upon his own body. Sirius can’t help but groan and lean into it, his hips tipping forward, his free hand slipping down the coarse peppering of black hair skimming the ridged flat of his belly to wrap around the waiting heat of his own arousal. Remus’ fingers tighten with encouraging approval as Sirius begins to move his fist.

There are things he wants to say, oaths he wants to make and prayers he wants to pray to the shapes of Remus’ limbs and the taste and feel and smell of him, but all Sirius can thing to do in the moment is absorb the glory of Remus lying spent beneath him and the pressing bid of his touch—the couch of his parted and kiss-worn lips, the dare in his eyes for Sirius to chase the limits of his own pleasure, see himself off here in near-consecrated harmony,  _ “Fuck,” _ Sirius gasps into the white noise of the rain and the fire and the hush of panting breath.

Remus’ fingertips dig into the height of his thigh, slip up to his buttock, blunt and intent, and Sirius feels himself sprinting up to his point of no return like a cliffside. “There,” Remus grates out through velvety, perfect exhaustion, “that’s it.”

And  _ oh, _ Sirius is gone.

His wrist stutters and he feels his pulse dive low, concentrated, zeroed in, suspended for just a moment before it snaps and he begins to spill over the quick rise and fall of Remus’ stomach. Sirius hears himself groaning low, an exhale like the end of some sort of chant, his breath catching around it several times as he comes hard. His muscles lock in distilled bliss as he rides through it, clapping the hand not twisting himself through his climax down over the back of Remus’ patient grip on his leg. It takes what feels like an eon for pleasure to ebb, pull its long and bloody teeth from his body, and once it does Sirius’ still feels caught in the jaws of something perfectly wondrous.

Below him, Remus is splayed out in a tableaux of every blood-hot dream Sirius has ever had—that muzzy smile, that chaotic muss of hair, his bare throat, the blushed skin, the rich splatter of Sirius’ pleasure painted across his stomach which he wears like ribbons of victory; all of it flawless, all of it for him. Sirius’ knees are glad for relief when he stumbles carefully down into a sideways sprawl beside Remus, tucking a demure and half-conscious kiss to the height of his jaw and letting his eyes fall shut in his rearing torpor.

“Sleep,” Remus whispers. Sirius throws an arm across Remus’ body, part of the coyote fur going with it, and wraps them both into a gentle peace, the likes of which Sirius hasn’t known since long before his years on the trail.

When Sirius dreams, they are color-bright things full of running alongside the cabals of sprawling desert animals with Remus, lithe and sacred and rich with leading fervor, at the head of their pack.

Some time later, Sirius wakes to the zooning of quiet desert air, Minnie’s bit jangling softly outside as she chews a knob of grass, and the subtle whisper of pen on paper.

He cracks his eyes in a squint to see sunlight dappling down through the clouds framed in the oblong crenulation of the open cave mouth. Sometime in his sleep he had curled over onto his side, balled up and folded in around himself as he finds himself most mornings upon waking, and he casts his gaze out to find where Remus has gone if not beside him.

“Good rest?”

Twisting up onto one elbow, Sirius rises to face Remus sitting back against the cave wall, wrapped in another coyote fur from the folded stack of them with his sketchbook propped against his knees and an indulgent smile on his face. Through a broad yawn, his jaw cracking faintly, Sirius gestures vaguely at the sketchbook. “How’d you keep that dry?”

“Not entirely.” Remus thumbs at one corner of the pages, which Sirius sees are blotted together with a faint touch of rainwater. Remus shrugs. “But it’s to be expected. Nature doesn’t always behave as predicted.”

He sets his stare to Sirius’ ankle, likely  _ back _ to it as told by the lines of concentration springing up quickly along his forehead, and Sirius narrows his eyes at him. “Am I sitting for a portrait?”

Remus makes a noncommittal sound without moving his focus. “You could say that.”

“Are you going to pay me, Mr. Lupin?” Sirius pulls himself up into a fuller sit, stretches, and then stands with a stuttering unfolding of his limbs. He catches, grins at, and revels in the way Remus looks up to watch the motion with his pen stilled on the page. “Let me see, you goddamn belvidere.”

Remus smirks and gestures him over, turning the sketchbook out to face Sirius’ approach. The lines there are scant and quick, but the grace in them in undeniable; Sirius’ body is thrown long, in repose like an unstrung bow, and the grace of every knot and valley Remus has lovingly sketches makes Sirius’ chest flex mightily. He swoops down and kisses Remus without warning, breathing deep on the little hum of pleasant surprise he makes, and only draws back when he’s sure Remus’ pulse has been ticked up to a steady run.

“You made me pretty,” Sirius murmurs. Remus’ eyes flash with mirth from so near.

“Don’t give yourself too much credit,” he sallies back, and Sirius decides that he very suddenly desires for his world to begin and end with Remus Lupin. 

In about twenty minutes they’ll return to town, back to the Inn, their clothes still a bit damp but a good story spun up about getting lost on the trail in the storm and Sirius sheltering Remus’ paintbox in a little hovel he found just west of here. But for now Sirius leans in to him again, not caring for the dash of ink he gets accidentally blotted on the inside of his elbow, and kisses Remus as though he’s he the one who brought the sun through the clouds after all. 

—

_ Two Years Later _

—

Sweat sticks to every plane of Sirius’ body, down from the trail a month past due but with a richer cache for it even though he curses the springtime sun with every beat of Minnie’s hooves that jostles his poor, sore muscles.

He wrenched his knee like an idiot chasing a fox to its warren, the poor fucker dragging a foot trap behind it and not only ruining the last catch of what would have been a record number of furs for a season but making Sirius land badly on his leg after tripping over a dead log. Let it never be said that spending nearly a decade-and-a-half on the trail has taught Sirius anything besides how to be quiet in the woods and skin a rabbit in no time flat.

But pained body or not, Taos arrives from the southern horizon like an oasis and Sirius could no sooner hold in his smile than turn right back around to Colorado.

The town has begun to swell beyond its old borders, buildings cropping up past where Sirius used to mark the end of his trapping season with the swish of Minnie’s tail across it. There’s a cobbler about a mile nearer than anything would have been a year ago, a newsprinter after that on the way into the plaza; it seems all sorts of things are expanding out west lately, even past the prime of its boom.

Sirius turns in at the Inn, tying Minnie to the outside post just for the brief stop, and draws a small pile of customary furs out from one of his saddlebags. The most delicate of the season, trussed up with a bow befitting Mrs. Evans—he’s inside for but ten minutes, as Mrs. Evans is busy woman with a baby these days, and Sirius emerges to mount Minnie again with a few extra dollars in his back pocket for his troubles.

He continues on south, past all the best haunts; the blacksmith for Minnie’s shoes where he’ll take her tomorrow for a new set, the general store where he’ll restock his tobacco, the munitions shop where he’ll look for a new bear gun sometime soon after his jammed this trip and he thankfully didn’t have much need for it. But those visits can wait a while. There are more important things to take care of before then.

Sirius stops further south than he would have any season prior, at a tying post that still smells of fresh wood when he gets close enough to it. He unhitches his main saddlebag, the one with a special white ermine fur and some small whittled figurines he carved during his downtime, tucked close alongside the journal pages he kept to keep himself busy and promised he’d share upon his return.

Promising—he’s been doing a fair amount of that lately.

The courtyard gate swings open silently on its hinges built into fresh adobe, and Sirius latches it behind him quietly. He walks silently around the front porch, limping just a bit for his goddamned knee, around to the back kitchen entrance where he knocks the dirt from his boots on the flagstones before twisting the handle slowly and stepping in sideways, light on his toes so as not to rattle his spurs once inside.

The landscapes hung on the walls have changed a bit since last he slunk through this hallway—something new from Mr. Sharp himself, a small Lupin original there where a Blumenschein hung last summer—but Sirius pays them little mind. His veins thrum with excitement as he creeps across the Mexican tiled floor, a reminder of home that Sirius was surprised to find didn’t hurt at all the first time he stepped across it. When he reaches the front room just beyond the kitchen, Sirius stops for a moment to lean against the wall and feed his heart, simply watching.

Facing away from him to catch the view out the front window, Remus leans in close to his canvas with the late morning sun catching the edges of his hair to fade them into a brilliant flaxen shine. The light cuts through the linen of his shirt and picks his arms and torso out of its shape in faint silhouette, and Sirius can hardly breathe for a moment to find that no matter how many times he can arrive to the comfort of Remus after any time away at all, it still knocks his heart flat out.

Sirius lets him paint in silence for just a few moments more before he clears his throat. “I was told there was a request for my timely arrival?”

To his chagrin, Remus hardly even flinches—he doesn’t even turn around to face Sirius. “You’re back early,” he hums, still wrapped up tight in concentration, dipping into a bluish-purple on his palette with his attention still snared to his painting. Sirius snorts and makes his way over, stopping just beside Remus with his hands on his hips. 

The canvas shouts with oranges and yellows, a sunrise bursting forth from behind the ridge of the mountains outside the very window view open before them. It’s captured in half-finished perfection, and Sirius squints down at the lower edge onto which Remus is applying very careful daubs of the darker paint in the shape of a tiny horse and rider. He grins. “But you were expecting me, weren’t you?”

Finally, Remus sets his paints down and turns to face Sirius. The calm of permanence has grown to live in him steadily like a root system since he purchased the land on which they now stand, and Sirius’ spirit leaps into chest to see it shining through those eyes like shimmering lake water slaking his every thirst.

He says nothing more, reaching up to take Sirius by the dusty, sweat-stained collar and kissing him soundly as the only greeting Sirius has ever needed in his life.

Sirius stumbles forward with a laugh against his mouth when Remus tugs him forward, up from his seat as Sirius’ hat flips off his head to the floor with a thud, the painting left for later in the day as they trip and tumble their way into the bedroom they share here like a heart-warm secret—again, and again, and again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks so much for reading, I hope you enjoyed this one! Feel free to [follow me and say hi on tumblr](https://chromat1cs.tumblr.com) ^^


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